method for serializing lua tables

I'm not sure why JSON library was marked as the right answer as it seems to be very limited in serializing "lua tables with any arbitrary format". It doesn't handle boolean/table/function values as keys and doesn't handle circular references. Shared references are not serialized as shared and math.huge values are not serialized correctly on Windows. I realize that most of these are JSON limitations (and hence implemented this way in the library), but this was proposed as a solution for generic Lua table serialization (which it is not).

One would be better off by using one of the implementations from TableSerialization page or my Serpent serializer and pretty-printer.

Lua alone doesn't have any such builtin, but implementing one is not difficult. A number of prebaked implementations are listed here: http://lua-users.org/wiki/TableSerialization

require "json"
local t = json.decode( jsonFile( "sample.json" ) )

reference here for a simple json serializer.